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Equinix Opens New Flagship Data Center in Frankfurt

Equinix, Inc., the global interconnection and data center company, today announced an expansion of its presence in the Frankfurt market with the opening of its latest state-of-the-art data center. Known as FR6, the new International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data center is located at Equinix's Campus Kleyer as part of the digital campus in Frankfurt, Germany. The new facility offers low-latency connectivity to Europe and international markets, and is designed to meet enterprises' need for data-intensive applications such as electronic trading, data analytics, and IOT scenarios such as autonomous driving — which require IT deployments closer to the digital edge.
Today's organizations are working hard to transform the way they create value in a digital world. Digital disruption is causing IP traffic to explode worldwide, accelerating the need for connectivity. Companies can extend network infrastructure to the edge and enhance workload performance by shortening the distance between digital services and users. By providing this increased capacity in Frankfurt, Equinix expands its role in advancing the digital economy's interconnected era, in which businesses are demanding increasing levels of interconnection to accelerate business performance.
Highlights / Key Facts
Frankfurt is one of Europe's leading financial centers and a hub for banking, commerce and manufacturing. Equinix's Frankfurt data centers offer dense concentrations of telecommunications, cloud and IT services, financial services and manufacturing companies. FR6 is the latest addition to Campus Kleyer, one of the most carrier dense digital locations in Europe. The first phase of FR6 will add 1,325 cabinets and more than 72,000 gross square feet of data center space.
Campus Kleyer is one of the most network-rich Equinix locations worldwide. With 300+ networks and carriers from 70+ countries, it is one of Europe's most interconnected hubs, acting as a primary gateway between east and west. Campus Kleyer provides low-latency access to all five continents and less than 8 ms latency to all of Europe. The $92M investment in FR6 by Equinix is one of many new builds in its growing global platform of 175+ data centers and enables connectivity to customers and partners across digital supply chains.
With the demand for interconnection increasing globally, German businesses are realizing the need to align their IT infrastructure closer to the digital edge. For example, GfK is undergoing IT transformation and has selected Frankfurt as its IT hub for the region, with satellite deployments in secondary metros being established to increase IT performance. Once rolled out, all of GfK's data transfer within the EMEA region will run via Equinix IBX data centers by 2018.
Frankfurt is an established European gateway to global trading opportunities, financial services firms and trading venues and is home to a multi-asset/multi-venue financial services ecosystem. It also provides the lowest latency connection to other market participants and acts as the primary trading hub for Germany's main trading venues including Deutsche Börse. Recently, digital payments has emerged as a strong sub-segment, as Equinix data centers provide the storage, connectivity and compliance required by payment service providers.
Enterprises looking to gain access to major cloud providers including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Salesforce, and VMware vCloud Air, can do so via Equinix Cloud Exchange™. Available to customers in the Frankfurt metro area, Cloud Exchange provides enterprises seamless, on-demand and direct access to multiple clouds and multiple networks in more than 20 markets worldwide. Additionally, customers in this market can access F5 Silverline DDoS Protection for additional security.
Quotes
Burkhard Kehrbusch, Global Head of Information Technology, GfK: "Earlier this year, we signed a service agreement with Equinix covering how all our EMEA data transfer will run via Equinix data centers by 2018. This partnership provides us with a scalable, cost-transparent access solution ensuring business-critical data is safeguarded with the highest levels of security. Lastly, the central location was a critical factor – Frankfurt is the ideal starting point for further expansion across Europe and the world."
Tarek Al-Wazir, Hessian Minister of Economics, Energy, Transport and Regional Development:"As a significant part of IT infrastructure, data centers are a prerequisite for the digitalization, indispensable for the processing of the ever growing data traffic and for operating the growing number of interconnected devices in industrial production and services. The Frankfurt region is an excellent location for this sector, whose power consumption already exceeds that of the Frankfurt airport, Germany's biggest employer. I am delighted that Equinix, a global leader in its field is opening its seventh data center and I am equally delighted that Germany's data centers are among the most energy efficient data centers in the world."
Eric Schwartz, President, Equinix EMEA:"Businesses are increasingly interdependent and cloud-enabled, and they depend on social, mobile, cloud, IoT and analytics to compete. The old way of doing business is diminishing and future success depends on interconnection. We also see companies putting infrastructure in more markets around the world to optimize performance at the digital edge. The new FR6 data center gives businesses another option for direct and secure connectivity in this key international market, as IT becomes more distributed."
About Equinix
Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX) connects the world's leading businesses to their customers, employees and partners inside the most interconnected data centers. In 44 markets across five continents, Equinix is where companies come together to realize new opportunities and accelerate their business,